Worst ecommerce website ever MkII

I blogged about how bad IMG Ecommerce's Events Online ecommerce website was last year. It was therefore with some dismay that I had reason to use the same website again, and to find it just as bad one year on.

It starts off poorly with some truly poor UI design: a button group with no default and poor names:


progressing to bad/incomplete user feedback


awful button layout (and one-question-per-form dragging out the process)


only the breadcrumb gives a hint of what to do here


and the piece-de-resistance: TWO buttons labelled Payment!


What a joke of a website from IMG "the world's premier and most diversified sports, entertainment and media company".

Runner Up...

A close second in the abysmal ecommerce website stakes is the Easter Show online ticketing site.

Lowlights include:

• you must type in a quantity AND PRESS PURCHASE - but that just updates the quantity (it doesn't actually purchase)
• you must press COMPLETE ORDER when you are done. But if you enter a number in any box and press COMPLETE ORDER it will not recognise that input (back to step 1).
• note the instructions at the bottom, which might as well say "DO NOT USE YOUR WEB BROWSER THE WAY YOU ALWAYS HAVE FOR EVERY OTHER WEBSITE EVER, or it'll be your fault when your order is screwed up"!

How do these things make it through user testing?

When non-runners strike...

This is what happens when a "non-runner" publishes a race map on the web... That's a big jump off the Cahill Expressway onto Macquarie Street, guys.

Who would do such a thing? It's ninemsn's new "mapmyfitness" site, with a blatant ripoff (even the name!) of a better established, better written US-based site http://www.mapmyfitness.com/.

Too bad the ninemsn site is slow as a wet-week - I "think"' they've missed the point about JSON being light-weight

value="[
{"__type":"Ninemsn.Simba.WebControls.VE.ShapeLayer,
 Ninemsn.Simba.WebControls, Version=1.0.2708.32310, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=null","Title":"Edit
Layer","Description":"","Shapes":
[{"__type":"Ninemsn.Simba.WebControls.VE.Shape,
Ninemsn.Simba.WebControls, Version=1.0.2708.32310, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=null","_id":null,"ShapeType":1,
"Title":null,"Description":null,"CustomIcon":null,
"CustomType":"Line","PhotoUrl":null,
"Points":[{"__type":"Ninemsn.Simba.WebControls.VE.LatLong,
Ninemsn.Simba.WebControls, Version=1.0.2708.32310, Culture=neutral,
 PublicKeyToken=null","Latitude"
:-33.8479105875013,"Longitude":151.211593151093},
{"__type":"Ninemsn.Simba.WebControls.VE.LatLong,
Ninemsn.Simba.WebControls, Version=1.0.2708.32310, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=null","Latitude":
-33.8460304508373,"Longitude":151.211292743683},

or, if you preferred:

value="[
{"Title":"Edit Layer"
,"Points":[
 {"Latitude":-33.8479105875013,"Longitude":151.211593151093}
,{"Latitude":-33.8460304508373,"Longitude":151.211292743683}
,{"Latitude":-33.8450770007942,"Longitude":151.211131811142}

Okay okay, I'm being harsh - maybe it's generated output from astoria - but the maps are slow to navigate. I wonder how the sponsor "Kellogg's Special K" feels about it - maybe they should go back to ninemsn to get it sped up (and maybe the map resized?)



It's certainly no "RaceReplay" :)